A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  He is five years older. He’s held the hands of dying men while vomit and salt-water slopped around the decks. But the worst, he says, is the men who want to die and can’t. He still sees them gibbering at him out of torn faces, or just their eyes, black with anguish, the pupils dilated, staring when the man was long beyond speech.

  ‘We ran out of everything. Chloroform, bandages, dressings, wound-drains. They say it was better managed in France but I’d like to have seen it. And some of those army surgeons are incompetent brutes at the best of times. They wouldn’t bother to hide it in front of an orderly – didn’t think it mattered. Only sometimes, if they heard me speak, they’d look at me queerly. I’ve seen them take a man’s leg off when it could have been saved with careful nursing – but there wasn’t the nursing to be had. And then it’d haemorrhage anyway, three days after the amputation. And the man’d stare at you as his blood came rushing out, too frightened to ask if he was dying. One of them kept apologizing because his blood had spattered all over the next stretcher and soaked the man lying in it. He was still saying he was sorry when he died.’

  There are crocuses up now, and aconites. He comes every day and we walk endlessly while the months of the war unscroll from his memory into mine. Gallipoli – the most futile campaign of them all. The hospital ships lying low in the water from their burdens. The chaos of stretchers and wounded men and orderlies mopping up pools of blood and faeces and vomit. The constant hiss of steam from the field-hospital sterilizers, and the long lines of men waiting to be operated on, while surgeons bustled among them sorting out the hopeless from those who were operable.

  ‘They’d talk to them as if they were still on parade, even when they were dying.’

  ‘Did you talk to them?’

  ‘Oh yes. All the time. It’s very frightening to die in a place you don’t know, with strange people around you. At least, it is at first. When they’re very bad it gets so it doesn’t matter. I liked to know their Christian names. They have wonderful flowers there in spring, and sometimes the wind would blow the scent over the dressing-tents and those who weren’t too far gone would turn towards it, sniffing for it like dogs. No matter how much water we carried round there were voices begging for it all the time. We couldn’t keep up with them.’

  ‘Do you remember those narcissi you used to have – great bunches in every room?’ I ask, and he nods.

  ‘They were always my favourite flower. I don’t know that I could stand them now. I should always be smelling gas gangrene coming through them.’

  ‘You couldn’t start the building again?’

  ‘No. I’ll take the paintings with me. They’re the only thing worth having out of all of it.’

  He’d said he wanted to visit my grandfather’s grave.

  ‘It’s in the churchyard,’ I say, ‘just inside the wall, about as far from the church as you can get.’

  ‘Won’t you show me?’

  I hesitate. ‘I don’t go there very often. The last time I went someone had put a jamjar of snowdrops on his grave. They think I neglect him.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s just that I don’t like going there.’

  You can see Miss Gallagher’s grave from my grandfather’s. Drops of water run down the rather showy black marble headstone which he paid for.

  Eunice Maria Gallagher

  A Faithful Friend

  It is the sort of inscription one would put on a dog’s grave, but the headstone is much admired and I know there is a feeling that I should have done something equally impressive for my grandfather, instead of the plain grey granite which bears the date of his death but not of his birth. We never knew it. When I came to draft the inscription I realized how many gaps there were.

  ‘You could pay Annie Semple to tend it,’ says Mr Bullivant. ‘She’d be glad enough to do it.’

  ‘Open your letter,’ says Mr Bullivant. ‘I’m tired of bringing you letters which you never read.’

  The pale spring sunlight makes me squint. My mother’s strong black handwriting looks clear, but is in fact quite difficult to read. It is a cool, small letter set in the middle of a big creamy sheet of paper.

  Pre-war quality: she must have kept it.

  Dear Catherine,

  If you would like to see me, you might come here now that the war is over. Write, and I will send you directions. It’s not such a bad journey.

  I should like to see you,

  Your mother,

  Cynthia Quinn

  ‘I wonder why she signs herself with my grandfather’s name?’

  ‘It’s hers too. She doesn’t use her married name.’

  I go back to the letter.

  ‘Douarnenez. Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s a little fishing village in Brittany. She’s living a couple of miles from there. She has some friends who’ve bought a farm; not to farm, of course, but to live in. They’re painters. She’s renting a cottage from them.’

  ‘You mean she’s moved for good?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, but she’s there for now.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘Not to see her. But I know Brittany; I’ve been there to buy paintings. You’d be surprised how many painters have lived there at one time or another.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Oh, poor. At low tide there are women swarming all over the rocks, mussel-picking. They tuck up their long black dresses and the girls jump from rock to rock. They need good balance, because mussel-shells cut like razors if you fall on them. The tides go out for miles. There’s plenty of fish, so no one starves.’

  ‘Whatever is she doing there?’ I have a sudden, flying vision of my mother in black, sure-footed, leaping from rock to rock as the tide swirls in along the sand-channels. She jumps like a goat and her basket is full of fresh, succulent mussels.

  ‘She’s very fond of these particular friends,’ says Mr Bullivant, ‘and they’re very fond of her.’

  ‘Have you bought their paintings?’

  He hesitates. ‘Well, no. They’re not my type of thing.’

  ‘You mean, not much good?’

  ‘I’m not saying that. You’ll probably meet them, so you can judge for yourself. Why don’t you go and see?’

  ‘I haven’t the money,’ I say, ‘really. We have nothing.’

  ‘I’ll give you the money.’

  ‘Can you afford it?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve sold the fountain. They’re coming to cart it away tomorrow. The buyer is delighted with himself: he thinks I don’t know what it’s worth. He could hardly control his excitement when he came to see it. I took a hundred pounds from him, and he couldn’t get the money out of his pocket fast enough. So here you are.’ He takes an envelope out of his breast pocket. There are twenty big white five-pound notes in it. He counts off ten and holds them out to me.

  ‘You’ll be able to stay some time if you want to.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to Italy.’

  I take the money, fold it and tuck it into my skirt pocket.

  We have reached the hen-run. Several of the hens have come out to peck at grit in the sun. They stop and look at us with the self-righteously busy stare of hens. Soon they’ll be pecking up groundsel and coming in to lay. The slightly acrid smell of hen droppings wafts from the coop. It is all so familiar. My hands know every fence post: where the wood is smooth, where it’s splintery. My hands know the warm fullness of finding an egg in the straw. The paddock grass still has its wintry yellowness, and it’s empty now.

  ‘We kept goats there, all through the war,’ I say. ‘That’s how we got our milk.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Mrs Blazer did. But she took them with her when she went to live with Harry Shiner.’

  ‘Good God. She must be sixty.’

  ‘Maybe more. But he wanted her, you could see it. And off she went. She sends me rosemary water to rinse my hair, and goats’ cheese. She thinks nobody’ll have
me if I don’t look sharp.’

  ‘Is that what I can smell? The rosemary on your hair?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘Living with Harry Shiner. They put up with that round here now, do they?’

  ‘He’s a wizard, so no one’ll cross him.’

  ‘I like the smell,’ says Mr Bullivant. ‘It seems to go through you. Not sweet.’

  ‘Like the lemons.’

  ‘Yes. When I think of you – when I thought of you – it always had that sharpness, like lemons.’

  He looks at me as if I am a solid, continuous thing in his mind, to think of and to come home to. He makes my darkness shaded and beautiful, lit by the lamps of the lemons.

  ‘There’s a lot of things about me you don’t know,’ I say hurriedly.

  ‘Of course. Of course there are. We can’t hope to know everything about one another. I went to your grandfather’s grave, you know. And that woman’s – what’s her name – the woman who used to look after you –’

  ‘No, that was Kate. She was the one who looked after us. Miss Gallagher taught me.’

  ‘Miss Gallagher. That was it. What an extraordinary woman she was. I always used to wonder what on earth your grandfather saw in her, to have her always in the house.’

  But he speaks as if it really doesn’t matter, and we walk on.

  ‘There are graves here too,’ I say. ‘All old houses have them.’

  ‘Whose? Do you know?’

  ‘A hare Rob shot. And a baby who died a long time ago.’

  ‘It’s the same with my house in Italy. You can’t live on a piece of land there without knowing there are layers of people who’ve lived there before you. Their houses, their fires. Their bodies I suppose. But usually I don’t think of it. You said you’d come and see my house there, do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘France is on the way to Italy.’

  ‘But you’re here.’

  ‘Not for long. I’m finished here.’

  I look round at the empty paddock where grass and weeds will spring up again as soon as the days grow longer. Without the goats they will grow uncontrollably. How can I keep pushing back this tide of green? Bindweed is waiting to twine its way up the rose bushes and squeeze them to death. One fragment of white bindweed root, dropped into the earth, will grow into a thick green snake in weeks.

  ‘You couldn’t find the graves now,’ I say. ‘They are quite overgrown.’

  The house is fighting me too, gently but with great force. It doesn’t want to be a house any more. It swarms with life. It has become a place for starlings to nest and rats to scuffle: a habitation of owls. When I went into my grandfather’s room his window was black with leaves. There are so many empty rooms, but I’m not sure that there is room for me in any of them. The drive where my father picked out stones to divide good from evil is packed with moss now, and the stones cling to one another. They have grown together. This is the dream of a man who came from nowhere with nothing. It needn’t be mine.

  ‘Tide’s coming in.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Come and look.’

  I kneel up in bed, dragging huge pale flounces of eiderdown with me. The light on the wall ripples. There is almost nothing else in the room but the bed, made of old black oak, high and hard and broad, with its bolster like a dead body and its stiff twill sheets. But the eiderdown is a dream of satin with panels of lace, oyster-coloured and delicious as water on our bare skin. I am sure it is the secret self of our landlady. I noticed how she stroked it without looking down when she showed us the room. She is tall and spare and firm-faced, always dressed in black. She cannot imagine what we are doing here, but she is glad of the money. She is widowed and she has a foolishly blond son of about eighteen who just missed the war and seems determined to be idle for the rest of his life in celebration of this.

  ‘He puts his boots out for her to polish, did you see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d throw them out of the window if I were her.’

  You could just about throw a pair of boots into the sea at high tide. The house stands on a little grassy rise, hedged by tamarisks which are all blown one way by the wind, like greyhounds. The garden is full of sand. We lie in bed and hear them talking, not in French but in Breton. We cannot understand a word. It’s like listening to seagulls. The tide came up at ten yesterday, filling the bay and changing the light in our room until I felt as if I were curled up inside a sea-shell, listening to the noise of the waves. We get up too late. We miss half the day. Mme Plouaret tells us so every morning. ‘You have lost the best part of the day, M’sieu-’Dame.’ And her son lounges in the hearth, grinning, as she ladles out bowlfuls of hot milk to make our coffee.

  ‘Come and look.’

  He’s blocking half the window. He has pulled on his red dressing-gown and when he turns round I see the firm, careful knot he has tied in the sash. It makes me want to laugh. And as if he senses it he gives me a smile that makes his eyes shine. It’s hard to say what this smile is like. It’s not timid; he isn’t afraid of anything I am or might do. Yet it isn’t bold either. It’s the kind of smile you hardly ever dare let appear, except to a small child who will smile back as immediately as a reflection in clear water, so immediately that you want to cry.

  I like to watch him wash in the morning, ducking his face right into the bowl of water and rubbing vigorously at the short hairs on the back of his neck.

  ‘What are you laughing about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘There’s a boat – look – wonder where it’s going?’

  ‘It’ll be one of the fishing boats.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Wrong shape. But it’s so far out I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Let’s go down to the quay when they come in, and get a lobster.’

  ‘D’you think she’d cook it?’

  The window sill is low. He hasn’t fastened the shutters and they blow to and fro, to and fro, though the breeze is mild, not like the wild day nearly a week ago when we arrived. I have never been so sick in my life. Sick on the boat, sick on the little train with its wood-slatted seats and stink of cigarettes and sausage, sick again on the jolting cart that brought us here. It was dark by the time we arrived and I could hardly stand against the rough warm wind.

  ‘We’ll have to stay here for ever, there’s nothing else for it. I can’t possibly go back.’

  The sea grows bluer each day. But it doesn’t last, Mme Plouaret keeps assuring us, there’ll be a storm soon. You can’t play about with our sea here. She tells us about the hungry teeth of the Point des Espagnols and the Point du Raz, and how many men and ships they have caught. Last year an old woman was blown over the edge of the cliff while she was gathering gulls’ eggs. Behind Mme Plouaret’s back George winks at me.

  ‘Gulls’ eggs!’ he exclaims politely. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever tried them. Are they good?’

  ‘You’ve missed nothing,’ she says grimly, seizing our bolster and thumping the life out of it.

  ‘How she loves disasters,’ he says later, when we are back in our room. He cups my kneecap in his hand, then bends down and licks the skin.

  ‘I can taste salt, must be from when we were bathing yesterday.’

  It’s cold and the sea pulls hard, bearing out Mme Plouaret’s warnings of rip-tides and currents. But at low tide there are big pools which the sun warms. We walk round the headland on firm, biscuit-coloured sand, past caves and mussel-clustered rocks and shallow rock-pools, to a big pool we have found where the water is deep enough to swim. But you have to be careful. The tide sweeps in and if we were caught we would never climb those cliffs.

  I haven’t seen my mother yet. It’s not far, just around the next headland, on the next bay. We could walk to it at low tide. But there’s no hurry. She doesn’t know I am here. One day slides into the next, and the promised storm holds off. It never seems hot, because of the wind, but my arms are tanned and my face is quite different when I bother t
o look in the glass. Already my hands are growing soft, losing their callouses, splinters and raw places. But it’s only for a little while, I think. I’ve grown to like the way my hands know how to work.

  The dunes trap the heat. We lie out of the wind, choosing our hollow carefully so we are sheltered but still able to watch the tide coming up. When we talk our words stay close instead of being whipped away on the wind. I dig a hole for our bottle of wine, wedging it in cold, unsunned sand. We eat bread and cold bacon, and occasionally there’s a muslin square with red gooseberries wrapped in it, or a piece of cheese. It’s impossible to keep sand out of the food, and everything we eat has a slight grittiness which we wash away with the wine. At night, when I take off my clothes, thin streams of sand fall from them. We never meet anyone.

  ‘Oh, we get a few visitors. Painters. But they don’t come, since the war,’ says Mme Plouaret. ‘There’s no money.’

  Old women in rusty black dresses crouch in the fields, scratching at rows of potatoes. There don’t seem to be any young men around, except for Jean-Marie.

  ‘They go away. And besides, the war …’

  One morning I go to the baker’s with Mme Plouaret and see the respect with which he greets her. She is a rich woman for these parts, with her big, scoured house and the rent of two cottages. She works, works, works; she never stops working. Jean-Marie is her only luxury. God knows what she thinks of us. Her eyes veil themselves and she says nothing. Jean-Marie is a hopeless fisherman, but his mother sets her lines unerringly, as if she’s already struck a bargain with the fish. She’s the first to detect the far-out metallic seethe on the sea that means a shoal of mackerel. We see her rush down to the rowing-boat which she drags across the sand in minutes. She leaps in and rows sturdily out to pull in mackerel after mackerel after mackerel, so many that she just lets them flop like oily rainbows in the bottom of the boat until they die. Killing them would be a waste of valuable fishing time. What we can’t eat straight away, she smokes in a little lean-to shed. Nothing is ever wasted.

  ‘If she netted an albatross she’d eat it,’ says George.